DON'T FEED THE ALLIGATORS!

Can we actually do things that make a difference? Here's an easy one to start with.

Talking with a friend a year or so ago about the effects of corporate greed on our culture, I was momentarily befuddled by his comment. "But we need those big corporations. Where would we be if Microsoft hadn't invented Windows?" Being a Mac user, it took me a minute. "Oh, you mean the graphic user interface instead of having to remember and type in all of the DOS commands?" "Yes, of course."

Well, Microsoft didn't invent the graphic interface. The two guys that started Apple Computers did, making possible use of computers by real people. Or was it IBM? Microsoft only got away with breaking Apple's patents.

Microsoft software is used on most computers. With more than 400 million users worldwide, Microsoft Office sales account for somewhere around $1 billion a year. That's a lot of money for a bunch of 99¢ CDs or downloads of a product virtually unchanged for many years, and with a lot of problems.

Going Beyond "No Child Left Behind"

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally adopted in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It was intended to provide resources to improve education in poor communities, to equalize educational opportunities and (significantly though less obviously) to provide more skilled workers to the labor market.

The law needed to be reauthorized by Congress every five years, and as this has taken place periodically, ESEA has been considerably amended, reflecting the changing political realities of the last forty years. In 2002, the Bush administration persuaded Congress to infuse ESEA with the draconian standards-and-testing agenda of “No Child Left Behind.” Although it still promised to “close the gap” between the privileged and the impoverished (and hence won broad political support), NCLB represented a massive consolidation of federal control over the content and process of public education, as well as a powerful endorsement of conservative educational ideology.

By dictating that schools must demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” as measured solely by standardized test scores, NCLB effectively saddled the schools with a pedagogy of “transmission”--the authoritative transfer of approved knowledge.